The invention described herein may be manufactured, used and licensed by or for the U.S. Government for Governmental purposes without the payment of any royalties thereon.
1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to manikins for use in fabrication and evaluation of body wear and is directed more particularly to a set of manikins for use in fabrication of body wear for U.S. Army soldiers, and other selected groups of human beings.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Commercially available manikins have body dimensions that represent idealized body shapes for fashionable purposes, rather than actual body shapes of groups of real people, such as soldiers. There are no commercially available manikins with body dimensions at the center of Army anthropometric distributions. This means that initial combat clothing and equipment prototypes are not developed over realistic body shapes, and that these size xe2x80x9cmediumxe2x80x9d prototypes are not in the actual center of the user distribution. Further, there are no commercially available manikins with body dimensions and shapes that correspond to the anthropometric limits of a 90% xe2x80x9coff-the shelfxe2x80x9d sizing requirement. Initial testing of the accommodation rates for prototype sizing systems often does not occur until late in the developmental cycle, when sizing corrections are costly and time consuming to implement.
Anthropometric data defining the center and periphery of Army body size distributions have been published as tables of numbers in technical reports, but such data is virtually unusable by engineers and designers who require solid models for their work.
Accordingly, there is a need for manikins which facilitate standardizing the sizing and design of combat clothing master patterns over a common anthropometrically accurate form, and which standardize the anthropometric limits corresponding to a 90% accommodation requirement for Army personnel.
An object of the invention is, therefore, to provide central forms which, provide realistic xe2x80x9caveragexe2x80x9d soldiers that center sizing systems and provide accurate body proportions for multicomponent integration of combat systems, thereby improving both efficiency and accuracy of sizing systems. A further object of the invention is to provide extreme forms which provide opportunities to check the ability of sizing systems to accommodate a full range of body sizes and shapes, required early in a developmental cycle, and without recourse to expensive human subject testing, and avoiding costly human factor failures late in developmental cycles.
A still further object of the invention is to provide statistical data describing the central and extremes of the body size distribution rendered in a physical form that is familiar and useful to clothing designers and engineers, to ensure that sophisticated mathematical solutions to sizing and design optimization are transitioned to end item developers in a medium that facilitates their use in everyday product development.
With the above and other objects in view, as will hereinafter appear, a feature of the present invention is the provision of a set of human torso manikins for use in fabrication and evaluation of body wear for a group of human beings, the torso manikins being shaped and dimensioned to conform to selected parameters derived from statistical analysis of the group. The set comprises a central human torso manikin of a shape corresponding to a multivariate center of anthropometric distributions of selected members of the group, and a plurality of extreme human torso form manikins, each of a shape corresponding to a multivariate extreme suitable for accommodation of 90% of the group. About half of the plurality of extreme human torso form manikins exhibits a dimensional specification substantially less than a corresponding specification of the central human torso manikins and about another half of the plurality of extreme human torso form manikins exhibits a dimensional specification substantially greater than the corresponding specification of the central human torso manikin.
The above and other features of the invention, including various novel details of construction and combinations of parts, will now be more particularly described with reference to the accompanying drawings and pointed out in the claims. It will be understood that the particular devices embodying the invention are described by way of illustration only and not as limitations of the invention. The principles and features of this invention may be employed in various and numerous embodiments without departing from the scope of the invention.